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IBM acquires Red Hat

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Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#341

Post by cthalupa »

kazen44 wrote: post #294
beatgammit wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as I heard this news, I was looking to invest in SUSE until I found out they were just bought by a private equity firm earlier this year. What's going on with Linux providers? Is Amazon really just dominating the space?

no, but most cloud providers are not opensourcing their contributions to linux.

Is that really true? The big three cloud providers all have commits to the Linux kernel:

~/linux   master ● $ git log --author=amazon --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an ' --date=short | grep @amazon | wc -l 206

~/linux   master ● $ git log --author=microsoft --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an ' --date=short | grep @microsoft | wc -l 1825

~/linux   master ● $ git log --author=google --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an ' --date=short | grep @google | wc -l 11283

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#343

Post by pinewurst »

rafaelturk wrote: post #309

This is a massive cash expenditure. IBM's biggest bet to be back into the cloud game. Given the amount of cash involved this might be IBM's last card, at least from an M&A perspective, so this deal needs to work. RedHat is much smaller than IBM, however far better managed with a clear product roadmap, lean sales and customer support. In a good scenario a reverse takeover will take place and RedHat management will tak…

There are strong rumors that IBM will be selling/spinning off its services group so perhaps that’s the funding justification?

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#344

Post by signal11 »

beatgammit wrote: post #207
solatic wrote: post #153

It's like Vader asked Luke to join him in defeating the Emperor (Microsoft) and ruling the galaxy as father and son - and instead of the audience hearing "I'll never join you!!", we hear "sure, let's team up." The cognitive dissonance is so strong here. WTF just happened? If you asked me a month ago to put down serious money in Vegas on this never happening, I'd have happily done so. What on Earth were they thinking?…

As soon as I heard this news, I was looking to invest in SUSE until I found out they were just bought by a private equity firm earlier this year. What's going on with Linux providers? Is Amazon really just dominating the space?

Ubuntu (Canonical) just stared looking more attractive as they were trying to be an independent commercially-supported Linux offering.

Or, if you don’t like Canonical (and to be fair they do a lot less than Red Hat do), encouraging corporate users to sponsor Debian directly would be amazing.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#345

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

cosinetau wrote: post #288
ianai wrote: post #231

The history of the “free economy” is one of concentration of market power. Good reference is Galbraith’s “1929 the great crash”

I feel you're right, which is why I'm surprised by the seemingly negative response to this news, and the overwhelmingly positive response from GitHub+Microsoft. Some of the same conflicts of interest exist in both modern cases, notwithstanding, both have opposite contribution histories. Am I missing something?

I got the impression that nobody at all on HN was happy about the GitHub thing, FWIW.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#346

Post by int_19h »

cmurf wrote: post #304
bloopernova wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share the sentiment. Gawd. Freaking. Dammit. I've been using RHEL-derived systems for like almost 20 years. This actually feels like a betrayal of the Open Source community. Any bets on whether Fedora and CentOS will exist in November 2019?

The boilerplate and vague statement of Red Hat remaining a distinct unit doesn't really tell us anything. More relevant is what the CentOS and Fedora communities think of this acquisition, because no matter what they are community driven projects. There are two coins to toss: whether IBM reaches into Red Hat in a way that kills off either project; and whether enough of the community steps out. I'm curious what openSU…

Conversely, I wonder what this does to the Linux ecosystem. It looks like at this point, Debian and Arch are the only major self-sufficient distros (i.e. not built on top of another distro) that are still community-owned and community-driven; and of the two, Debian is clearly more broadly popular. So, will this result in Debian becoming the de facto standard of "open Linux"? This could make things interesting when it comes to packaging etc.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#347

Post by c3d »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #31

There cannot be a single Red Hat employee outside of RH's board of directors that thinks this would be a good move for Red Hat.

I have some hopes that Red Hat has a strong-enough future value for IBM that we end up redefining IBM rather than the other way round. There are precedents, notably the Apple/NeXT merger. Today's Apple is 95% NeXT and 5% old Apple. Can this happen here? Time will tell.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#348

Post by throwaway76543 »

pcwalton wrote: post #278
throwaway76543 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, without question. Systemd provides me absolutely no benefit when running a server and adds considerable complexity and fragility in a critical component. A traditional SysV init is just fine. Want orchestrated service invocation on startup? Run it from SysV init instead of replacing SysV init. There is no need to conflate the "sysv rc system" with "sysv init." They are entirely separate things.

So you're saying to just use SysV init to launch processes from inittab, and have one of those processes be a systemd/launchd clone that launches everything else. I mean, I guess that's a possible design, but at that point I would question whether using the SysV init program is really buying you anything. In any case, most people wouldn't consider that design "SysV init". The SysV init ecosystem is built around rc fi…

I teach unix internals to engineers as part of my job and I've found most engineers aren't intimately familiar with the distinction between the RC system and the init system at all. I agree there isn't widespread understanding of this distinction but I think it is because most engineers simply don't know how any of this works.

The reason to keep these things modular is flexibility and ease of analysis and improvement. The major criticism I see with systemd is that has undefined operational scope and unbounded feature creep. It has no stable interface between components and changes behavior in incompatible and difficult to predict ways fairly regularly. From a systems perspective it's a big ball of mud and the lack of a formal interface makes it prohibitively difficult to change or replace its subsystems.

I don't like that systemd performs ANSI animations on my machine's serial console, for example. Have you seen the "marquee" animations it does when certain services start? I sure would like to force it to print sequential lines of text instead, but I can't.

I don't like that when systemd updated basic utilities like "reboot" I lost the ability to use them in a chroot. Even "reboot -f" which does not need to talk to init. I had to write my own one-liner to call reboot(2) myself not too long ago.

System components need to be well scoped and replaceable. There's a major design problem brewing in this area.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#349

Post by icebraining »

jacques_chester wrote: post #156
rodgerd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me a single core product IBM have open sourced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFS_(file_system) https://openpowerfoundation.org/

What has OpenPOWER actually open sourced? Seems to be more a quid-pro-quo between IBM and its select partners.

Re: IBM acquires Red Hat

#350

Post by dihedron »

jjoonathan wrote: post #21
pinewurst wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse, IMHO. IBM treats their customers as prey just like Oracle plus they treat their own people worse. I know people who've had the IBM licensing ninja squad show up at their door for surprise validation with a big bill as a result.

However nice their open source work is, RH licensing is already every bit as scummy as the others, at least if my coworkers in the department I used to work for are to be believed. Bait and switch freebies, "we need to run this sketchy shell script on your production system to determine how much money you owe us" nonsense, coming back with a ludicrously inaccurate bill that has to be argued over point-by-point with l…

> bait and switch freebies. How true.
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